Today service providers are beginning to embrace a pay-as-you-go billing model. This is a model where the user is billed for the amount of service used or resource consumed rather then a fixed, flat monthly fee. However, in the pay-as-you-go billing model, the service provider must be able to meter, monitor, or measure the customer's usage of a resource or service. Additionally, where necessary, the resource or service provider must be able to identify the customer's usage of the resource or commodity to both the class (or quality) of the resource or commodity, and to the quantity of the resource or commodity.
Consider, for example, cellular telephone service. In a typical cellular telephone service plan the customer is billed by the number of on air minutes. The number of on air minutes is then sent to a billing system where it is applied against the customer's plan, for example, $29.95 per month for the first 300 on air minutes and thereafter $0.25 per minute for each minute over 300 minutes.
Consider a more complex system, residential electrical service may be delivered through “multiple meters.” One meter is for “base line” service (see FIG. 7 feeder log detail 411a) at, for example $0.11 per kilowatt hour for the first 600 kilowatt hours, and an increasing amount for each additional 200 kilowatt hours. Another meter is for “interruptible” power (see FIG. 7 feeder log detail 411b) at $0.09 per kilowatt hours. A third meter may be for “time shifted” power (see FIG. 7 feeder log detail 411c) at a high rate during daytime hours and a reduced rate for evening and night time use. Finally, there may be a “backwards” meter for “selling back” co-generated power (see FIG. 7 feeder log detail 411d). Consumption of the different classes of service is sent to a billing system where it is applied against the customer's plan and billed to the customer.
In a pay-as-you-go billing model, numerous events are measured in a distributed infrastructure, such as a cellular telephone or electric power service area, and are sent to a central billing system to charge the customer for the services or resources. One requirement of a billing system in a distributed pay-as-you-go billing system is accountability and tracking. There must be a way to ensure that billable events generated by feeders at the point of use or consumption are received at the billing system. This requires reconciliation of feeder's feeds to the billing system with the feeds actually received by the billing system.
FIG. 1, captioned as “PRIOR ART” illustrates the flow of billing events from a feeder 41 to a billing system 48. The feeder logs the records sent to the billing system in a feeder log 42, and the billing system logs the records received by the billing system in a billing log 49. To be noted is that the reports generated by the feeder 41 and logged in the feeder log 42 may not match the events received at the billing system 48 and logged in the billing log 49.
Currently the reconciliation between feeder records and billing records is performed manually, that is, by comparing reports generated at the many feeders with reports actually received and entered at the billing system. As pay-as-you-go billing systems become prevalent for service and resource providers, the sheer volumes of records flowing from feeders to the billing systems will increase, and manual systems, even “management by exception” manual systems, will no longer be acceptable. This means that there is a clear need for a reliable, automated way to reconcile feeder records to billing system records.